Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen is pretty sure that people are overthinking things when it comes to criminally charging Donald Trump. In Cohen’s view, the twice-impeached former president needs to be treated like Al Capone and convicted for his more “simple” crimes.
Cohen appeared live on “CNN Newsroom With Jim Acosta” on Saturday to discuss the ongoing investigations — plural — into his former client. And while he’s confident at this point that Trump is facing bleak outcomes in any scenario following these investigations, Cohen argued that prosecutors might be aiming a little too high when it comes to the charges they want to convict Donald Trump on.
For him, the thing that would likely get actual results would be charging Trump with smaller crimes that are pretty definitively documented at this point.
“I also don’t understand why we’re so fixated on getting him for everything,” Cohen said. “You don’t need to do that. Let’s get him on the simple stuff, the stuff we already know, which is tax evasion, misrepresentation to banks, you know, lying on personal financial statements. Like what they did to Al Capone! You don’t have to get him for X, Y and Z. Let’s just get him on that, simply, to put him where he belongs.”
Although the notorious mob boss known as Scarface during the Prohibition era became “Public Enemy No.1” for a multitude of alleged crimes including murder, it was actually 22 counts of tax evasion that eventually put him behind bars for an 11-year sentence.
All that said, Cohen seemed pretty confident that Attorney General Merrick Garland and the DOJ have enough evidence to charge and convict Trump on most of the crimes he could be accused of by now.
“The truth has come out, and the truth is never good for Donald Trump,” Cohen said. “And in this specific case, yeah, he’s had 9,000 lies. But at the end of the day, you have all these people who have been brought in, who have provided testimony. You have documentary evidence, like the evidence I provided to the House oversight committee, that implicates Donald Trump in a multitude of illegal or, I should say, improper actions that he should be brought to court on.”
You can watch Cohen’s full comments to Acosta in the video above.
